In the Garden of My Memory

Years ago I created an art car on which I was inspired to paint and illustrate an original phrase that came to mind when I was thinking of my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat and all the women who have to re-create their worlds when war, natural disasters, bad relationships, stunted aspirations, or a myriad of disappointments change their lives: "Because she remembered her grandmother's garden, she planted her own. Flower by flower she remade the world." This is now a phrase I live by. Actually,  that idea directed my life--often literally--before I was aware of it, for in all the moves we've made to improve our circumstances, the one thing that has remained constant is the energy we put into creating a garden immediately when we've settled.

As I noted in this post of January 17, I set for myself several art, craft, gardening and writing goals for the year to see me through the presidential election and beyond. The stupidity of the election cycle can be so astounding that any thinking person keeping up with the news has to find a way to balance illusion and fantasy with reality, venality with generosity, amoralism with ethics. Work helps, but I am unemployed since I left my last job a year ago to move to the state where my husband had begun some months previous to my moving a more monetarily-rewarding job than I could acquire. So sustained gardening,  craft, and writing do that balancing act for me now.

One of my projects is the altered art journal that I described briefly in that January 17th post. I keep all the materials on an antique table in my study and work on the journal as I find the time from other projects and as inspiration strikes. It's the work of an amateur, but it gives me joy. The journal has become not just a record of 2012--rendered in paint, collage, poems, even sewing, embroidery, and crochet--but a memoir. The journal entry of this week focused on gardening, and I created two tiny, hand-stitched booklets to place in seed-packet pockets that I glued to the pages. In each booklet I wrote an essay about the flowers of my childhood and my gardening memories.

This is one of those essays, with minor editorial changes:

My earliest memories of gardening have almost disappeared into some inaccessible compartment of my brain, but I remember hoeing weeds in our garden in Old River, Texas. Mostly, however, I remember my father working in the garden. When I was very young, he had a couple of plow animals that he used to cultivate his garden, donkeys he called Jenny and Jack. I remember standing barefoot on our front porch, watching Daddy hitch up the plow and head the donkey on a straight run through the garden to create a row for planting. Sometimes the donkey didn't comply, and Daddy would begin to curse. This is where I first learned curse words though I didn't use them myself until I was much older.

I also remember gathering okra and eating the fresh, raw pods as I delivered a batch to the kitchen for cooking. Our household was a traditional one, and we girls did most of the housework while my brother, six years younger than I, did many of the outdoor chores when he was old enough to take them on. I would have much preferred hoeing in the garden, I think, to washing and folding clothes. One summer when I was a teen, I decided that the grass growing around the cement blocks under our house was unsightly. We didn't have a weed-eater, and there were places a lawn mower couldn't reach. I spent several days in the hot Texas sun hoeing that grass away from the house. It was work I initiated and thus work that I liked.

One of the funniest and yet not-so-funny experiences from my teenage years occurred one day when I was picking field peas with my grandmother Ruby Scott Benton. Grandma Benton was a short, fat woman; she was in her sixties at the time and suffering from ailments associated with her weight. She could not lift her feet very high off the ground, and when she tried to step over a row of peas, she fell flat on her back in the sandy soil. I was horrified, but Grandma started laughing, and then I did, too. She looked like a June bug waving its limbs around, trying to roll over to right itself. Grandma Benton was a very even-tempered woman, easily moved to laughter, and it was easy to be happy in her presence.

The first garden of my own was one my husband and I planted when we were students at Texas A&M University at College Station. We were living in married student housing, and the university owned some undeveloped land behind the apartments which the administration designated as a gardening area for married students living in university housing. In the spring, someone would disk the property and divide the land into small garden lots. Married students could choose a plot to garden. 

Tom and I worked very hard in that first garden. Tom would load up our Ford Ranger with free chicken manure from the Ag Center, and we added that manure to our garden to amend the soil. We also weeded assiduously. I remember getting down on my hands and knees to weed, trying to make that garden as weed-free as possible. We were rewarded with such beautiful plants and bountiful vegetables that our gardening neighbors began to comment on the lushness of our garden. Some of them assumed--and told us--that we had "lucked out" in getting the best gardening spot. So one year someone beat us in choosing that patch which we had amended with manure, and we got one of the least desirable plots on the edge of the disked land. I have a photo of myself in that garden that Tom took. I am standing near a row of corn as high as my head, smiling triumphantly. We had proven, if only to ourselves, that our dedication and hard work could turn a plot of land that no one else wanted into a productive garden. 

That might have been the year that someone stole all our vegetables, leaving behind the knife with which he had done the deed.

When Tom and I went to Nova Scotia last September to visit the land where my ancestor Abraham Dugas (Dugast) had lived in the 1600s, we learned how the Acadians had turned marshy land into productive farm land by building dykes to drain the land. They also farmed all up and down the Annapolis Valley and the shore along the Bay of Fundy. Google search "best farmland in Nova Scotia" today, and web pages will pop up describing Kings County, Nova Scotia, as having the best agricultural land in the province.

But perhaps the Acadians were too successful in their farming and gardening. They, too, lost their produce to a neighbor--the British government, which confiscated all their property and exported them to other British colonies. Stripped of their farmland wealth, the impoverished Acadians had to start over in foreign lands. Some made their way to Louisiana, carrying with them a love and skill of gardening. 

Perhaps my Acadian/Cajun genes explain in part my own love of gardening. And a natural disposition to be wary of those in power and those envious of the success--however slight--of others.